Confirmed Debris From MH370 Begins Path to Closure

The search for MH370 off Australia gains steam as debris is officially confirmed to be from the missing plane.

As French prosecutors this week confirmed that a fragment of an aircraft wing discovered on Reunion Island was indeed from Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the search for the rest of the plane is ramping up in a remote swath of ocean more than 1,000 miles away.

The announcement from the French prosecutor, confirming the debris piece's serial numbers as matching those from the aircraft, is a small relief. The lack of any firm evidence from the jet had been a sore point with the families of the 239 people aboard the flight, but even with this positive identification, there’s still no closure and likely won’t be until the wreckage and the critical black box data and voice recorders are found. Attempts to reverse engineer the path of the wing part, known as a flaperon, have yielded little information because there are too many other variables, like the unpredictable nature of ocean currents. Still, investigators are expected to use this opportunity to review satellite images of the ocean taken shortly after the time the plane went missing.

MH370, which has now been missing for more than 18 months, is believed to have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean, in a zone known as the "seventh arc." This theory was arrived at due to pings picked up by a satellite as the plane flew, though without its usual communication systems operational, for up to seven hours after going off course. Australian investigators leading the search for the jet thousands of miles to the west of Perth, Australia said that, while this latest news was welcome, it wouldn’t alter the parameters for the search, which has covered about half of a 46,000-square mile zone.

“There’s still a lot of territory to cover and still a very high prospect that we will find the aircraft,” said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. He adds that while it’s "useful to have formal confirmation (of the evidence), it hasn’t actually made a significant difference to our search.” The arrival of summer in the southern hemisphere will bring it improved weather conditions, and the search team is set to introduce advanced sonar equipment and an additional vessel to the trio of ships on the job for the last year.

The new phase of the search is expected to wrap up in June 2016, and there’s growing optimism that the aircraft will be found by that date. “If it’s there, which we believe highly likely, we will find it,” Dolan was quoted as saying this week.